My Hopes For the Foundry

I've tried to keep my eyes open for foundry related topics, but have not been able to catch some of the information I've been hoping to discover, so in the hopes of getting some answers, if people know, as well as possibly generating a few suggestions that Cryptic might take to heart, I've decided to simply outline my hopes for the foundry.

I'm fairly experienced with the STO version of the foundry. I made a few missions that were generally rated well, even if they were geared for specific people, guild events, or just attempts to mess around with the system. As the foundry was updated, I tended to bring the missions offline due to glitches that would pop up as a result of updates, and lack of the time to search through to fix things that had not been broken before.

- My first hope for the foundry includes no longer using placeable objects that spawn one form or another based on how many objects are on the map. This proved to be quite aggrivating when building a climbing or jumping component into the mission, and content updates would mean that the system got reworked at times, and essential parts of the puzzle would be entirely removed, or end up pointing the wrong way. In the end I discovered that they were based on an incriment of three, and could work with it, but still, some updates caused it to skew, and require additions or subtractions from the map. I understand that this doesn't really affect anyone who isn't making multi-level content, but working in all three dimensions is rewarding, and can be both visually as well as conceptually impressive.

- I hope Cryptic allows us to fully customize the NPC encounters. In STO, we could pick from pre-made encounters with set weapon types and behaviours, and we could reskin them to look like anything we could make with the foundry NPC outfit tools. While visually this is a good step, it does need the added functionality of modifying stats and equipment, as well as creating individual enemies. It's difficult to make a suitable boss encounter when you're limited to regular NPC contacts that most experienced players could dispatch with ease, and simple flavour aspects, such as how the enemy is armed, are important. I envision making bosses that are on-par with those in Cryptic's own content, and it always bothered me that I could never make an STF-level boss in a mission that was meant to have a truly gruelling final battle.

- If we have pregenerated enemy contact groups, I hope we can easily identify which ones will spawn as what in parties up to the maximum party size. It's very easy to test solo content in the foundry, but getting a group of beta testers to play your mission in a pair, trio, quartet, and full party, just to find out what sized party will spawn what NPCs is very difficult (at least over multiple playthroughs). The boss might have been meant to be a Borg Tactical Cube, or a Romulan Scimitar dreadnought, but in a larger party, it could be skewed to have either multiple of said NPC/ship, or not even be the right one, due to scaling.

- I hope that foundry-created environments can be truly hostile. This includes everything from deadly falling damage, to fires that actually burn, to traps that can be arranged any way we desire. I also hope that the strength of said traps can be tuned from minor annoyance, to outright deadly.

- My final hope, at least the one I'll list here, is that we can test the content we make at any desired level, and design it around specific player skills, and equipment. This ranges from low to high level, specific damage types, and using the player dungeon crawling skills, such as Dungeon Delve, or Thievery (the rogue's trap/locks ability). While the content all scales in STO, we could only test with level 1 characters, which makes it very difficult to judge what kind of experience a top level, well-geared character will have.

Those are just five of my most important hopes for the foundry.